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The project should go forward despite its faults. And it probably will. Supervisors across the ideological spectrum, including Matt Gonzalez, Gavin Newsom, Tony Hall, Chris Daly, and Gerardo Sandoval, have said they support the project in principle.
But putting housing on Rincon Hill didn't have to be such a difficult decision. Clear building guidelines could have given us a beautiful, livable, amenity-rich walking neighborhood that would have saved developers time and money. "If the Planning Department had been clear about saying, 'These are the public benefits you have to pay for,' the builders would have saved money on lawyers. I blame the Planning Department as much as the developer," says Kate White, executive director of the Housing Action Coalition, a group dedicated to increasing the number of housing units built in San Francisco.
Beginning in 1999, the Planning Department began discussions aimed at producing a plan for an integrated, Vancouver-style neighborhood in the Rincon Hill area. The Planning Department's long-term planning division hired UC Berkeley professor Peter Bosselmann to do the sort of urban modeling that helped put high-density housing towers and uncrowded-seeming neighborhoods in downtown Vancouver. He created a simulation of the Rincon Hill buildings that developers Tishman Spier and Marty Dalton were proposing, showing that the buildings would create a massive, most un-Vancouver-like, light-blocking wall. Bosselmann presented his results at a public meeting hosted by the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research (SPUR) Association. The following week, Bosselmann's contract was canceled. People in the Planning Department believe the Rincon Hill developers exerted pressure to censor the report.
This ongoing tug of war, in which developers are awarded points for lobbying and NIMBY neighborhood groups gain advantage by clamoring (while the city's staff of planners is left out in the cold), benefits nobody. Jim Chappell, president of SPUR, supports approval of the zoning changes that would allow the Rincon Hill buildings now proposed. But he is dismayed at the politicized process that brought them this far.
"There's nothing to be gained by our process here except by lawyers, expeditors, people who thrive on chaos. It doesn't serve anyone – developers, residents, anyone," says Chappell. "I was just in a meeting with a bunch of people, and we were talking about Rincon Hill and these issues. It's hard to know why it happened, this piecemealing of the neighborhood, going one project at a time without a new, adopted plan.
"This was advantageous to the mayor, and not to a long-range planner."
Indeed, anyone who follows San Francisco planning issues closely lays blame for the politicization of city planning at the feet of Willie Brown and his handpicked planning director, Gerald Green. Green was working as a low-ranking department official with no academic planning background when Brown aborted a national search and elevated Green to the department's top post.
Green has told me he believes a planner should play a mediating role among competing city interests, rather than advocate a particular vision of urbanism. Green's deal-making-first attitude, combined with his unfamiliarity with many basic planning concepts, has demoralized the Planning Department. According to a recent complaint obtained from the department's staff suggestion box, planners believe Green routinely meets in private with attorneys for developers, informally approving high-profile projects before his professional staff has even seen them.
The situation has become even more chaotic during recent months.
A year ago, Green applied for a one-year Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, using, in support of his application, the work of long-term planners who say Green routinely sabotaged them. He was accepted and left for classes in Cambridge in September. Yet Green remains San Francisco's salaried planning director. In an arrangement worked out between Willie Brown and the Planning Commission, with the guidance of the City Attorney's Office, Green attends class for three weeks, then returns to San Francisco for a week of work here.
Green's absences, Planning Department staffers say, have positive and negative aspects. The staffers say it's been a breath of fresh air to work with Lawrence Badner, a city planner and a manager with whom they can actually hold meaningful discussions about technical concepts. But the experience has been disconcerting for those who deal with the department from the outside.
"It's not really clear who's in charge," says Planning Commissioner Lisa Feldstein. "On the one hand we say, 'Planning and land use are really important.' On the other hand, we say this should be handled by a quarter-time director."
White, the director of the Housing Action Coalition, puts the positives and negatives in the same thought. "The last time I met with Larry Badner, the acting director, he had just gotten off the phone with Gerald Green because he had to check everything with him," she says. "I think it's absolutely absurd that the director of the Planning Department is in Cambridge, Mass. The head of the Planning Department has an impact on every single person in the city. It's the department that lays out the future for the city."
And then she adds: "Because Green did such a poor job when he was here, it's better that he's not here, in a way. Badner has stepped up, and he's moving things forward that were stalemated. But because Gerald has the ultimate authority, I'm not sure what he [Badner] can and cannot do."
Not everyone agrees that the current situation is problematic. Tim Tosta, an attorney with Steefel, Levitt, and Weiss who represents developers of Rincon Hill buildings, recently visited Green in Cambridge, where they dined together. "It's a stunning experience for the community of which our common interest binds us together," Tosta recently told the Planning Commission, according to meeting minutes. "It's a wonderful environment where Mr. Green is right now."
